by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

A sermon given January 27, 2008

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Good morning! 

Come into this circle of love and justice

Come into this community of mercy, holiness, and health.

Come in just as you are, whoever you are,

You are welcome among us--

“Tell me a story . . . .”  I remember saying that a lot as a child.  Growing up in the South means growing up with storytellers—it’s just in our blood.  My father never read stories to us--he made them up, on the spot, when we kids asked for one.  And my grandfather, who grew up in Texas, told us stories of the Wild West—real stories based on his experiences and his reading of Zane Grey westerns. 

And I grew up a voracious reader—in the 3^rd and 4^th grades, I read Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  If you’ve ever read them, you know that they really are grim, really bloody and gory.  And the endings are not always happy, either, but the stories are real, with all the archetypes of life illustrated in living color.  This was a time when our family was breaking down, a time when childhood innocence needed to give way to a more complex view of reality, and fairy tales helped me make that transition.

Stories bring us many gifts.  They can help us escape for a while, to enter a world of the imagination, that compels and delights us.  Stories give us vicarious experience—that is, we can feel and love and lose and triumph, through the experience of the characters in the story.  Stories render meaning, become the lens through which we understand who we are and what the world is like.  Even our theology--our sense of our place in the universe--comes from story, or how we frame our experience.  That is, of course, what all art forms do—frame experience: take the chaos of our lives and integrate it, order it, and make meaning.  Art, in fact, is perhaps what makes reality bearable.  Our personal story and how we frame it, makes all the difference in how we see ourselves, and our vision of what is possible in the world. 

With all this dark winter weather, I recently decided to read something a little more upbeat than my usual reading.  I mean, as a personality, I can become terminally serious, especially when it rains for three weeks in a row.  It’s not a good idea, I said to myself, to continually pore over books with titles like The Denial of Death, Dark Nights of the Soul, and Explaining Hitler. I thought, you know, it’s time for a change—so I decided to read Seabiscuit. 

I expect many of you have read Seabiscuit, or at least have seen the movie, so you may know the story.  It concerns a racehorse that in no way should have been winning races.  This horse was ugly, not sleek and beautiful like the other racehorses; he had knobby knees and a strange walk; on top of all this, he had a really nasty temper.  Then there was the trainer, a talented man who had fallen on hard times and was about to go under when he met Seabiscuit; and the jockey, who was really too big to be a jockey and who was blind in one eye, besides, and who was only marginally successful, before he met Seabiscuit.  Three losers, in other words, got together and healed and redeemed one another, and Seabiscuit, with his great heart, became the fastest horse ever, and inspired the whole country that, at the time, was going through the Great Depression. 

Why do we all love this story?  Because of course we’re all Seabiscuit.  I mean all of us.  We look around, and we think, gee, all these other people are doing just fine, I’m the only one who’s hurting and confused,  I’m the only one with the knobby knees, I’m the only one who’s different.  But as a minister I’m here to tell you that everyone has something to deal with, everyone has his own version of knobby knees, everyone has a piece of Seabiscuit in them.  And of course, we love the story of this horse because it’s “a true story,” it really happened.  We all want to believe that redemption is possible.  That healing can come.  That we can win the race that life presents to us, that we can be brave enough and strong enough to go the course.  We want to believe that love and patient care can see us through, as they did Seabiscuit, and as indeed they can for us.

We know that just as stories can heal, stories can hurt.  I’m referring now to personal stories—the stories that the culture tells us or that our family has told us and that we may now continue to tell ourselves.  We may find ourselves living out of a story that is self-destructive, and we may need to reframe that story. 

One way to think about this process is to understand that all our stories about ourselves—or for that matter, about anything--are constructed—that is, they are not real in any sense of the word, they are made up.  They are made up of what people have told us, or reflected back to us.  What is real is this moment that we are living—the past is a story, and the future is a story, and none of that is real.  The past is always selective memory and interpretation—and the future is a guess.  So the way we frame the past or cast our lot into the future can be shifted or changed or to some extent, chosen.  Sometimes that shift requires a lot of intentionality, a lot of work, on our part, because we have internalized somebody else’s bad story.

Sometimes the place and time of our growing up gives us a cultural story that just doesn’t fit.  A little boy grows up in the 1950s and when he’s fairly young, he realizes that he is attracted to other boys and not to girls.  But it’s was not OK to be attracted to boys, so he follows the cultural story: he comes of age and dates girls and marries a woman he likes very much, but does not love.  Twenty years later, he finally feels he is able to come out as the man he has always been, to claim his truth.

I grew up in a time when women were supposed to find meaning through the man they married.  If a woman had a job, it would be as a teacher or a secretary or a nurse, and that job would be done only until she could find the right man and support him in the important work he would be doing.  That story turned out to be a colossally bad fit for me.

Young women these days are being told another cultural story that is every bit as much a lie—they are being told that they can have it all—they can climb the career ladder and also carry most of the responsibility for the parenting and the homemaking.  Work structures need to change so that family relationships can flourish, for they are the fabric that holds this society together.  But the cultural message is work and work and work and spend and spend and spend.  This is not a story that leads to love and patient care and courage and redemption.  This is a story that leads to shattered relationships, isolation, and ultimately a sickness of the soul. 

Besides the cultural story, we grow up with particular family stories.  What story about yourself were you told by your family?  The story I grew up with, as the oldest child of three, with no mother, was that my needs were not important, that my place in life was to take care of other people.  Could this be the reason I became first a teacher, then a therapist, and finally brought it all together as a minister? 

As Maya Angelou warns us, “There is no agony like bearing an untold story within you.”  There were things we didn’t talk about in my family.  We didn’t talk about my father’s drinking, so as not to disturb him.  I was never told until I was an adult that my mother was in a mental institution.  And as children, my brother and sister and I certainly didn’t talk about our feelings or needs—there was just no room for these.  And so as an adult, I have told my story—in all kinds of forms, in all kinds of ways, through the years.  In fact, my adult life has been a process of revising the story, of learning, of sharing, of becoming. 

It was hard for me to trust enough to begin to tell my story.  In the past I have told you how the writer Wendell Berry, who was my writing teacher and my mentor, pushed me to write truthfully about myself.  It was for his class that I finally wrote my first autobiographical essay.  I had stayed up the whole night before, struggling with the writing.  The next morning, I reluctantly read that unedited draft to the class.  This was  the first time I told the truth about myself—I showed myself as I was: angry, sad, joyful, caring, self-centered, passionate, compassionate—all of those contradictions, and more.  And all of me, as I was, was accepted by that class.  That was a revelation for me.

Memoir writing has become a popular pursuit these days, not just for professional writers, but for lots of people.  Look for a writing retreat and a memoir writing class this spring in our church calendar.   It is significant personal work, to tell your story.  Your story blossoms into something much more subtle and complex when you allow it to wash over you, when you allow the images to return, and the metaphors to appear from the subconscious. 

I look at a picture of my mother, and I remember her: I see myself in her dark hair and eyes, and in the way she throws back her head and laughs that deep laugh that sometimes comes from me.  I see my father getting up before dawn, taking me fishing, packing the big 88 Oldsmobile with our long poles and with a box of Vienna sausage and saltines and boiled eggs and an orange to eat later on.  I remember my grandmother rocking in her big chair and reading her Bible outloud, “Bless the Lord, O my soul, all that is within me, bless his Holy Name,” the very same Bible that somehow I received when she died.  I remember all these things, and I know I have been greatly blessed, I have been loved.

My work with Wendell Berry made all the difference in the direction my life took.  I saw him one day in the hall there at the University of Kentucky where he taught, and I said to him, “You changed my life, you know.”  And he said, “No, you changed your life.  I just asked you to use words well.”

So people have stories, and these stories come from many sources, and they come to define what we see as the self.  One of those important sources is our religious tradition.  Every tradition has its saving story, and so does Unitarian Universalism.  As most of you know, in our faith, we find truth where we find it, and we draw from many traditions.  So for Unitarian Universalists, God is One.  We don’t find our God separate from or superior to the God of another tradition—light comes from many different sources.  We believe that a person’s true theology is revealed by how that person lives in this world—what you do with your money, what you do with your time, how well you love, what kind of compassion you show for those who are marginalized among us.  Not that we’re saved by works, but we’re surely not saved by theology, or what we believe.

Well, then, what is our saving story?  That is most clearly articulated by the Universalist part of Unitarian Universalist.  Universalism tells us that everyone—with no exceptions—everyone is welcome at the welcome table.  Universalism tells us that God is a God of love, not a god who punishes people by throwing them into a fiery hell.  There is no hell, except the one we make for ourselves here on earth.  And God knows, we’re good at doing that.

Universalism tells us that the color of your skin, your sexual orientation, your gender, your mental or physical state, your social class, or your theology—that none of these qualities, these human qualities, make you ineligible for God’s love, or make you ineligible to come into this community of believers.

Universalism invites you to leave behind the cultural story that you are the sum of your possessions; that you must be young and beautiful, if you want to be loved; that white is superior to dark skin; that being gay is somehow less than being straight.

Universalism says to each of us, no matter what your story has been, that you have dignity and worth, that you are lovable, that you can love.  Universalism says that no one is beyond forgiveness, is beyond redemption, and that there is a Love that is large enough to hold you, in all of your contradictions of character, and is large enough to hold you in your despair, when you think all is lost.

Here at First Unitarian, that’s our story.  We invite you to be a part of this story as we ourselves heal and as we help to heal the brokenness in our world.  Yes, that’s our story.  It’s a true story, and we’re stickin’ to it.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we find ourselves in stories that are not life-giving, and we need to revise these stories.  Give us the courage to reveal ourselves to those whose hearts are big enough to hear, and give us hearts big enough to hear the authentic stories of others.  May we live in the understanding that there is absolutely nothing we can do to escape from the Love of God, and may we be able to accept the abundance of that love as it appears in our lives.  Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you go from this place today, go with the sure knowledge that you are loved and that you are accepted just as you are.

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Copyright 2008, Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.